Things to Contemplate

Guest blogger Andrew Hornick presents some thoughts on aliens...

If you like to read science fiction and watch it in the movies or on television, you must have given some thought to the issue of UFOs and associated alien life outside our solar system. If you cruise the Internet on a quiet rainy day, you will learn that there definitely are aliens, many seen from, or living on Earth, some captured by your government and some of us have even been traded by our government in exchange for alien technology. I’m guessing marketing voice mail and answering systems being among the first acquisitions.

According to the literature, there are a number of different types of alien life forms. This is expected as the universe has an almost infinite number of places for life to have formed and has had something like 15 billion years to do it in. That is a lot of time for many things to happen. The current culture seems to have registered a category called the “Grays” and some have identified up to three different types of Grays. The “Hybrids” are breeds obtained by genetically crossing Grays with humans and subsequently look somewhat like us…. but different. The “Reptilians” are kind of what you would expect. Lizard type folk that, of course, are carnivorous. And last, (I’ve avoided the term finally) the “Nordics” which come with blonde hair and blue eyes and are my favorite, assuming they come in female versions.

These aliens range from three feet tall to eight feet tall and apparently come from galaxies in the constellations Orion, Areturus, and Pleiades. There are all kinds of details about them from what they eat, how they communicate, and collusion with our government, to how they created religion to move our civilization along faster. This last item implies they are not all that much more advanced than we are.


All these things seem somehow possible if you have an open mind. One thing that stands out however, that I cannot help but seriously question. In the books, in the movies and on the Internet, there is no reference anywhere, let alone description, of their clothes. Just once you’d expect to hear, “These short gray guys wearing orange jumpsuits…” These beings land all over the world from deserts to mountains and they don’t wear clothes. If they were cold blooded, they would slow down in Maine and New Hampshire and not be able to abduct people very efficiently. You’d think someone would bring a sweater along? Ok, even a super plastic polyester of some kind. It also brings into doubt functioning on a space ship, that if it didn’t take years to get here, at least a week. Who’s in charge? Who calls the shots? Who cleans the toilets? No clothes, no uniforms, no stripes, no badges, no way to designate jobs or rank unless everyone on board is suppose to memorize their rank and everyone else’s rank before they leave home port. And if they are so advanced to have interstellar space flight, you’d think they had to reproduce to last that long and would have a family. So family, but no holiday gifts that Dad wears for sentimental reasons?

I’m sorry, but this is the loose end where all the storytellers have dropped the ball.

And hey, how come when people die and they come back as ghosts, they’re wearing clothes? Did their clothes die too? Do you get to take one outfit?

Do other people think about this stuff?
-by guest blogger Andrew Hornick

If Arnie Sold Cars

I hate it when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up in my dreams. He's always trying to sell something. Last night it was the world's fastest car. It looked like an extra wide Ferrari that stretched to a ten foot wide disk as it reached speeds of around 600 miles per hour. It was actually a great deal and could travel from Paris to Moscow in 2 hours; Timbuktu to Cairo in 30 minutes; and Baghdad to Istanbul in 25 minutes.

I was on the verge of buying the thing since I happened to have a suitcase full of gold bars when I realized that this could mean the end to warfare as we know it and the beginning of something far worse. How could anyone be stopped when they are speeding down the highway in a blur of dust and smoke? An entire army could invade on these land-based supersonic sports cars.

I turned to the California governor and said, "No Mr. Schwarzenegger, I can't buy this right now. I must find a safe place away from these cars. They could speed into my favorite city and drop off a battalion of uniformed hitmen before anyone could say boo."

"But they are hybrid cars," he said to me in his recognizable accent. But his salesman days were over.

The only reasonable thing to do during a dream like that is to buy a remote island and hope that I'm forgotten. It turned out to be a lovely island on the Mediterranean. The fear of the super cars dissolved into a cute little memory as I dug my feet into the Italian sands and waited for the end of the world. A world now so far away...especially now that it would again take hours upon hours or even days to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth. But that was okay with me. Maybe the best progress occurs when we slow down.

This is probably a sign that I am still not ready to get a driver's license.